The judges said it “emerges seamlessly from the surrounding landscape. “It is a daily joy to live here,” said Mr Worsley, who has put the house up for sale after the death of his wife.The house won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Sustainable Building of the Year award last year. It’s just like making mud pies, but on a massive scale,” said Mr Worsley.To prevent rain or rising damp from washing the mud away, the metre-thick exterior wall is mounted on a stone slab and capped with a corrugated iron roof.Every element of the house is designed to reduce its impact on the environment: shelves are built from recycled plastic, the shower is heated with solar panels and the washing machine and lavatories use rainwater collected from the roof.According to Mr Worsley, the house is cheaper to heat than a conventional house, thanks to the metre-thick earth wall and heat-retaining blinds on every window.Cobtun House includes an open-plan living space, a modern kitchen and an organic vegetable garden. The mud was taken from a nearby building site, and piled into shape by hand.”We mixed the cob with a digger, then pitchforked it on by hand.

“This was an attempt to introduce aesthetics to the equation.”Mr Worsley’s design brief was only 10 words long: “Humour, mystery, fantasy, ecological, sustainable, independent, contextual, agricultural, invisible.” From that vague outline, the architect John Christophers, of Associated Architects in Birmingham, devised a plan to use a mixture of mud and straw, known as cob. It was built to order in 2001 for its current owner, Nicholas Worsley, a retired barrister. “Sustainable houses are usually very worthy – but very dull,” he said. Cobtun House might sound like something from the Third World, but it represents the height of ecological design. Overlooking the river Avon near Worcester, it combines modern principles of sustainable development with ancient techniques of mud construction.
Behind a primitive-looking outer wall of piled clay, the house has an airy modern interior with ceiling-high windows. It could be the most expensive mud pie of all time. A four-bedroom home made from clay, straw and recycled plastic bottles has gone on sale for an asking price of £745,000.

In the first definitive portrait of the nation’s consumption of pornography, The Independent on Sunday can today reveal that more than nine million men – almost 40 per cent of the male population – used pornographic websites last year, compared with an estimated two million in 2000.. “The coronation service is such that whoever takes the oaths actually takes oaths to defend the Christian faith,” he said.”If, by saying that, he meant that he wanted to uphold the freedom of people of every faith, then I have no quarrel with that. But you can’t defend every faith, because there are very serious differences among them.”In an interview earlier this week, the bishop – who was born a Muslim – called on fellow Anglicans to reassert Britain’s “Christian character” and resist the trend towards a “multi-faith mish-mash”.. Record numbers of men and women are downloading pornography from the internet, making Britain the fastest-growing market in the world for the booming £20bn adult website industry.